My friend Mirai has been doing her first play through of Demon's Souls and, bless my heart, she's been playing on the PS3. Mirai and I talk a lot about art stuff, so I couldn't help but to throw random screenshots from the Remake at her so we could have a giggle. Surely this wouldn't devolve into hours of screenshot comparing, and grumbling, and... well(It always ends up as an article, I swear to fucking god Mirai).

... I thought I was over this, but here I am, accidentally scratching open old wounds.

To be clear up front, I hate the art direction of Demon's Souls Remake. I mean hate hate it. If you like it, that's cool, no shade, we all have our own priorities. We care about different things, and tolerate different things differently and it's fine IT'S FINE YOU'RE FINE~

I think it's deeply important for a remake to have it's own identity. I think it's impossible to make a perfect remake without having your own opinion. Even if you slavishly upscaled everything exactly to match the original designs, changing the fidelity of the content changes the context. You get the repeating grass field in the ps3 Shadow of the Colossus(Don't ask Neolucky, the BEP cutscene artist about Bluepoint's SoTC remake, she might be a bigger hater than me) remaster. Stuff just doesn't work the same way when you scale it up(so stop upscaling and smoothing out vagrant story you fucking animals oh my fucking god).

You gotta make decisions and they made decisions, as they should have! But I swear to god, somehow, as far as my tastes are concerned, and despite all odds...

Every single one of them was bad.

That sounds like an unfair statement. It kinda is an unfair statement(Some of them are at least mid). Some less invested people look at me crazy when I say it! Bluepoint has tons of technically great artists! These designs aren't poorly executed or awkwardly designed. Everything is high fidelity, perfectly color graded, well performing, and well optimized... but there's a problem.

Years ago I wrote an article, "Design Literalism vs Lateralism"(which, while no longer on this site, is available here). It's rough, even by the standards of most of my writing, but I think the concept holds up. From Software excels at this "Lateral design", doing things just a little weird, a little different, seemingly picking the literal options that people shy away from, but going lateral where people like to play it straight. For those of us obsessed with From's designs and art, this is one of the biggest appeals, and one of the things about them that is the most difficult to imitate.

The problem is... Whenever confronted with a situation that forced them to make an artistic choice, Bluepoint would choose the most standard option. Make the most expected decision... Almost as if they saw From stray from the formula, and assumed they made a mistake.

What, you had some fat evil men and forgot their BOILS? Amateurs.

What, why would this demon look so goofy and unnatural? Amateurs!

What, is this, a child's scribble? Don't you know a 3/4ths pose is more dynamic?

AMATEURS!

I could keep going, weapon and armor designs, to environmental design choices, weird details that make no sense...

Why does Vanguard have shackles and chains on him? Was he captured? No that's... just what you do? Why does he have holes in his wings? To look more gross, obviously! That's just what you do! It looks cool, right?!

You could do this with so many design decisions in the Demon's Souls Remake, but I want to focus on one.

Click that link and give it a good look. Look at the inspirations, look at everything. Now, to be fair, I hold no individual artist responsible for anything. I don't know what their briefs looked like, what their art directors said, or how much time they were given. Most of the concept art is very well executed. These are talented artists. I know factually that there were people on that team who fought for details they thought were important. I hold no one person to blame.(At least one person on that team thinks Blizzard and WoW are the peak of Fantasy Art and that person needs to be ashamed of themselves. But I don't know who it is, so the whole team gets off scott free... this time.)

This isn't even his final design(If you wanna see it, there is a video lower down in the article). This design was in the first trailer, where fan outrage made them change the head. All that aside, seeing what was originally intended(even though they claim it was a "placeholder", despite concept art) gives insight to how they think because... this could be a fire demon from anything.

Fire demon? You gotta do LAVA, right? and BIG, BIG demon horns. Why would the original design have small, goofy horns??? Gotta be built like an ape, like hellboy! Gotta look BIG and MONSTEROUS! How else are we supposed to know it's POWERFUL? And the Arena? Gotta make it look like some Diablo hell shit! Also the mouth of the temple? It should be a BIG DRAGON HEAD cause it leads the DRAGON GOD and that would be EPIC!!

None of this is bad but it feels like every other game, resembling the well executed but utterly forgettable work you see all over Artstation. Art that gets you hired. When your director asks you for a fire demon, you know what he's thinking. Do you really want to to give him something weird or goofy looking? Even if you had a great idea, do you really want to bother when you know your Director won't go for it? Even if the Director likes it, the Executive Producer will send it back for revisions. Why are you making yourself more work?

So you do what's tried and true. You can look at the references to the left of the concept art and see that is well worn ground. So... what did he look like on the PS3?

Flamelurker isn't lava. Flamelurker isn't fire. Flamelurker is on fire.

Your typical fire demon seeps lava like a monster drools. The lava is a natural part of itself. It, often, is the lava... but with the original flamelurker, all aspects of his design point to distress. Skin melting, not like rock, but like flesh. Clothes? Armor? Skin maybe? All peeled back painfully, flaying out, like birch logs curling in a fire. His soul is so hot it is used by the Blacksmith Ed to forge weapons. He looks blown out on screen compared to the PS5 version. Lava isn't that hot. You don't forge with lava unless you've seen too much bad fantasy. Lava melts, but fire burns. Wood burns. Flesh burns and carbonizes. These are the hottest flames. This is a fire disruptive to the being wielding it, destroying him from the inside.

Add to that all the potential lore... Flamelurker as the Legendary Big M, the man who killed dragons with his bare hands. Is this him, becoming like a dragon, like his likely descendants Ed and Baldwin, getting burned up alive by his obsession as is the usual metaphor in Souls game? Or did he die fighting the Dragon God? Is this burning his soul suffering and living on?

... Or is he just Lava Man Big, Very Hot? Just being strong and scary and posturing like a gorilla instead of being both uncannily monstrous and yet uncomfortably human? Fighting in a demonic hell temple, or in a temple of an old, fallen civilization... a mausoleum containing a great hero, used to symbolically seal away a god that didn't actually exist until the Fog brought it forth from legend?

Everything about the PS5 flamelurker, and his environment, and animations are so well executed... but they don't build to anything. They don't inspire any thought. While maybe not literal, as my old article would say, they are direct. The statistical average of a fire demon, in a statistically average arena, all executed with incredible skill. Is that not the true dream of videogames? To fight the most technically well executed big lava dude?

For me, as someone who doesn't care much about fidelity, designs like this leave me feeling nothing. This design does nothing to excite the imagination, or inspire curiosity. Even without all the possible lore, without all the deep readings... PS5 Flamelurker is an enemy I've seen in a million other games. He's probably a character in at least 3 different MOBAs. Even if the same design doesn't quite exist, it's existence is practically implied, an aspect of the ur-flame demon that exists at the center of the zeitgeist. Familiar and boring.

The original, at his worst, even if ALL the things I said about his design were bullshit and happenstance, he's still... a weird dude with a goofy face and a giant round dome of a head that makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe I am a little nuts, but I value that more. "What the fuck is up with HIM?" is a at least a thought I can dwell upon, where the Remake's design, if in any other game, would flow past me as soon as I looked away. Rote to the point of inspiring incuriosity. At best it is a pretty image to distract me for as long as I choose to look at the screen. Modern media rarely tries to intrigue you with depth, but instead by keeping up the pace. Aggressive animations, colorful, complicated, dynamic arenas, bright particles and lights. Please don't look away, we've worked very had on this.

A child who is used to screaming for attention doesn't understand the power of marinating in silence.

This isn't exactly Bluepoint's fault, because they're not exceptional in this regard. Heck, if they're exceptional at anything it's genuinely at the technical ends of art. But they are the unfortunate technical team that's being given Art Games to remake. They represent the whole industry, they represent movie VFXs, and even the future of AI.

Cogs in the Machine

Mirai and I end up talking about AI art a lot and a point she made, as professional CG artist herself was... the industry already treats talent like AI. The pipeline strips out creativity. Everyone is given a task so small that they can't really have much expression. The spots where you can add your personal touch are almost invisible.

You don't make the whole 3d set, you either make one or two assets for a set. They have to match, so don't be ambitious. When you're assembling a 3d scene, you're working from the props made by other artists. You may rig a model exceptionally well, but you're working with the animators so you can't be too ambitious or experimental. The animators? They're cleaning up mocap data. The more the work is spread, the more consistent the output becomes. Then when it comes back, you get notes, and the process moves again, like tweaking a prompt or re-generating with a different seed. The bigger a production, the less influential one person becomes.

You still needed a concept artist, but that time is passing. A person in this context often becomes not so much a contributing artist but a machine that turns time and money into random pictures. Or... at least that seems to be how it feels to the people in charge. They don't want the most creative, interesting, or unique version of something, they want the boring thing they see in their head done well. They want an exceptional version of the average. You can look at that flamelurker reference sheet. It had no hope of being an interesting design, because the only reference it pulled was from art that already existed and a few pictures of lava. Things get made a certain way, so artists who want to get into the field copy those things, feeding those images to producers, who then expect things that look like that, creating a pretty but numbing feedback loop.

This is what AI does. It can't be creative, because it can't think laterally. It can't even think. It can just analyze a prompt and predict the average. "Trending on Artstation" is a common AI prompt for a reason.

To go back to my old article... An AI will give you McCreeCassidy from Overwatch, but it won't give you Bayonetta(Well, it'll give you Bayonetta because it's trained on a million pictures of Bayonetta because Bayonetta is so fucking cool). It can't give you Bayonetta because it doesn't know how to make a Witch without making a Witch. It won't give you Johnny from Guilty Gear because even though he is in no way an outrageous, or complicated design, you can't say 'make me an air pirate katana dude' because it doesn't know how and is fundamentally incapable of finding the design between the prompt. You'll get a... steam punk samurai with a cog for an eye patch.

You can maybe sit there and come up the design and all the little details in your head, trying to generate it by banging on Stable Diffusion for days... but ultimately if you want something like Bayonetta, you gotta pay someone like Mari Shimazaki. Either way, the creative thinking is coming from a human.

At the same time though, while AI is bad at these things, the systems in place right now are also bad at these things. Maybe not as bad, but often close. Young artists training for decades to be the mechanical turks of executives who have "the vision". Of course they'll be replaced, they're practically designed to be replaced. Commodified assets whose real value is only known by those closest to them.

But these cogs are still human, and despite the restrictions in front of them, they still try to bring their passion to the things they work on. Losing them is not just a matter of lost jobs and wages, but that little bit of extra care, the safety valve for rich men and their unearned creative confidence. Human cogs can push back when they feel something is wrong with the machine. Because as utterly basic as Bluepoint's corporate tastes are, without real people around, there would have been no one to say no to this horrible Dozer Axe design(The one that ended up in the remake looks great and is proof at least one person on the team ACTUALLY loved Demon's Souls).

So Lies of P had patch that adjusted difficulty and I haven't played it, but I have played though AC6 who had the same thing happen and the discourse seems to be... about the same and it really just got to me how poor the nuance around difficulty discussion can be. Maybe it's more accurate when talking about Lies of P, maybe it's the same crud, but whatever.

Now, I'm very much on record saying the AC6 patch stuff is massively overblown. Only one thing really seems like a significant nerf and that was probably warranted but like... whether any of these changes are good is definitely something you could talk about. The changes, for example, (especially including the weapon based changes) seems very much designed to make more builds viable in more situations. You could easily make the case that "Even if the changes are kinda small, this is a game about building mechs, sometimes a build shouldn't viable for a situation to encourage you to use more options and explore the game" and I wouldn't agree with you (I think you're still rewarded plenty of tweaking a build for a mission you always could beat AC6 with one design anyways) but like... that's a discussion, right? Where do you draw the line? My line isn't right and talking about our lines is a great way to build perspective.

... But most conversations aren't going like that. It's a lot of ARGGGGHHH BABY MODE!!! PEOPLE CAN'T HANDLE HARD GAMES!! THEY NERFED IT!! NERFED IT TO THE GROUND!!! They have to sell more copies so they RUINED IT!!! People will only be able to play the BABY version!

... like come on, how many more copies do you think they sold because they made Balteus's missiles track a little less?

There is a lot to unpack here. How people mythologize their own experiences as The One True Way, how any backward slide gets exaggerated by communities and repeated so often they become almost permanent lore. Instead, we're going to talk about people not understanding the many reasons why a designer might change their game to be easier. Why they might make these changes for reasons besides public pressure.

I think a thing a lot of gamer brained players don't realize is that Making is hard game is actually really really easy. It's so easy, that if you're making your first game, there is a good chance it's going to be way harder for other people than you think it is. It's so easy you'll do it on accident!

Making a hard game people want to actually play is the hard part.

I think it's hard for some people to realize that there is, almost certainly, a harder version of their favorite hard game that the devs had in testing and never released. That they are, by their own logic, even immediately from release, receiving the ""baby mode"". That outside of shitty as old LJN 8 and 16 bit games, that devs, even when they were making balls to the walls hard games, were... focusing on trying to give you an enjoyable experience. That the released game isn't some pure artistic expression that exists naturally, only to be corrupted against the devs wishes by player feedback.

Games are, largely, unnatural experiences. A lot of us designers try and make the unnatural feel as natural as possible. Some people hunt for really obscure, poorly made games, enjoying the weird emergent "natural" challenge that comes accidentally from naive design. But they are still, largely, an unnatural construct.

These constructs are, for the most part, made for our enrichment. We can argue the value of changing something, but we have to remember, even with the most Hardcore no normies, skill only!!!! games that these are constructed experiences. There is no true difficulty, no "real version" of the game. There is just the what we ultimately play.

I saw someone ask "Why would you make a hard game easier?" and I think if you're a gamer, looking for challenging experiences, that... makes sense. It's naive, but like, yeah why WOULD YOU? Well, here are are a few that have been stewing in my head!

It's Hard but it Sucks

This is the simplest. Pre-Patch Lost Izalith. A rushed area, filled with reused, rare mobs. "Hey this dragon butt only got used one other place so why not, we're in a hurry."

Pre-Patch Izalith has the player basically playing a poorly made stealth game to not get gang stomped by a dozen giant dragon legs. Later patches decided instead to turn this early Izalith section into a bit of a non area. It's not that bad, there are still things to kill you if you go exploring but the Dragon Butts are so hard to aggro.

If something sucks there usually isn't much of a pushback, but I've actually seen people defend pre-patch Izalith BECAUSE of the weird "stealth" gameplay.

... It seems to largely come from the same place as other difficulty arguments. "I had this happen to me so if other people don't, this means they were denied a complete experience"

Real proof that any changes, no matter how stupid the original behavior was, will be decried by someone as giving into babies.

The Curve is Wrong

A lot of dragging peoples asses through a hard game is tricking them to get in and into the game before tightening your grip... then releasing... and repeating. I Wanna be the Guy tried to have different, but reliable pulses of actual difficulty to keep things feeling fun in between the sections that made you want to die.

It's basically fixing a pacing problem. Usually people don't complain too much about these because their minor. I feel the AC6 weapon buffs hit this, giving better and more varied options early game. This certainly made the game easier, but no one talks about that aspect of the "difficulty nerf" because... well okay it's because people are bad at talking about difficulty as a holistic thing.

Anyways most games usually don't have that much of a mis-step here. When the first boss is way too hard that's usually not an unexpected bump in the curve, that's usually an intentional crest. That said, sometimes that difficulty spike doesn't quite work out how you wanted it to and...

The Wrong Thing is Hard

I feel like Balteus's missiles fit this. Watching my friend (hi Miko!!!), a hardcore AC vet, 1-shot Balteus pre-patch on her first playthrough, could kinda trick you into thinking the missiles were never that big of a problem to begin with. It seems the type of thing where, when you know how to play and move, it's not that big of a deal, but when you're new, it's a monstrous hurdle and that hurdle existing can be easy to miss.

"Oh we wanted to teach about pulse armor and want to encourage movement so this isn't just a slugfest but whoooops for some players and builds, this might as well be touhou."

This is one of one of the most common reasons for things to be hard, by the way. The designers, or testers, or whoever get too good at their game and underestimate certain elements because they're so much better at fundamental things like movement. Blind testers help but you're still trying to extrapolate a lot of data. For indie games, this can get super stupid. There is a 1-frame jump in IWBTG that's optional, but exists because I tested it once and got it the first try. Can't be THAT hard...

By reducing the difficulty in one area, you can allow the player to focus on the enemies you were meaning to highlight.

You Don't Want Them to Google it!

AC6 works great here again. Sea Spider was made vulnerable to more weapon types and while you can make the argument that the game is about builds!!, that type of attitude is what leads to someone going on reddit for help, realizing Double Zimms, Double Songbirds are strong, murdering the boss, and then never really switching.

Fighting a boss and not doing enough damage is generally a sign to a lot of players that they're doing something wrong and the response to that is often to look some stuff up. Easing certain parts of a fight, or making more builds viable can actually, in a weird reverse way, encourage to explore more, or use off the beaten path builds. You increase the likelihood of a player just endures and actually tries to learn on their own. That applies well to situations like Sea Spider where the biggest barrier was a knowledge check that... wasn't even a very good knowledge check (varied weapon type defense isn't well established in a game, and a lot of people are going to get to the fight with a build that already passes the check and not realize they were checked at all).

You Want to Make it Easier to Learn

Sometimes an early attack is too strong, or a boss does too much damage, or a checkpoint is too far. All these things are things that can be fine, or lead to a great experience, but other times you're like... Oh god wait no, it's taking people way too many attempts to get to phase 2, or to this hard jump or whatever, so you make that easier. I Wanna be the Guy had a lot of difficulty tweaks in both boss behavior and is save placement to try and help this along.

Brave Earth Prologue used to have lives, a feature I really wanted and defended to a lot of people who tested early versions of the game. Whenever the game is released though, it won't have them and part of the reason was because "While the repetition created by lives creates a novel learning experience in modern gaming... if I wanna have cool complicated bosses, I need to give people permission to fail". Making that area easier allowed me to make other areas harder because it gave players more chances to learn hard things.

To go back to AC6, I think this is where the IBIS damage nerf comes in. I feel less certain about this one, but I feel like, at least personally, when I finally beat Ibis, it wasn't by an inch, it was a mile. Her damage wasn't relevant for my eventual victory. Where it was relevant is... each attempt allowed me to get more information and to experiment more. The boss felt like she was going to murder you unless you learned her patterns anyways, so easing up on damage just seemed to encourage learning them more.

Ninja Taro (or it’s proper name, Sengoku Ninja-kun) is the exact type of game I hope to find when randoming in through old roms. I can’t expect to find some beautiful classic I never heard of (unless it’s on some obscure system I never knew about), but I can sometimes stumbled into flawed, quirky games with a good bit of ambition.

Ninja Taro isn’t a particularly good game. Just going by controls, it’s a bad game. But it fits a genre of game I always am interested in when I bump into them. I love finding an old ass Zelda clone. For all its popularity, bold faced Zelda clones are surprisingly rare. Zelda 1 clones are the most rare (Golden Axe Warrior being the only one that quickly comes ot mind) but most fit this weird in between zone between Zelda 1 and a LTTP.

Ninja Taro is right in this zone, though perhaps leaning more toward Zelda 1. The game is fairly linear but doesn’t restrict you. You can, and sometimes must backtrack. The game wants you to go one place, but the level design tries to keep up the illusion of a larger world. The overall structure of Ninja Taro is excellent, perfect for a Gameboy game. A more guided version of Zelda that never completely veers into restricted linearity.

Ninja Taro’s biggest issue sadly is it simply doesn’t feel good to play. 4 way awkward grid movement makes combat more about standing in the right spot and waiting for enemies to do all the work rather than active combat. Attacking on the move just isn’t a reliable thing, and you have to wait for Taro stop move to the next sub-grid piece before taking an action.

Most of the items you get are utterly useless. The game gives you ninja camo, fire, bombs and probably some other stuff, but no situation merits using anything but unlimited use swords and protectiles. Even bosses fall fast enough to rapid attacks that using any of these items is simply a waste of time

The game contains other gadgets. Ladders, bridges, sacred offerings… but having to go into the menu to equip them, use them, and then back to reequip your favorite sub weapon is needlessly tedious. Almost a punishment for misplaced ambition.

The game still gives a lot to find. You regularly find powerups for your basic weapons. We’re not talking about like a “+8 sword” like I found at least 30 of them for one of my swords and all that damage adds up. With pickups for two swords and 3 different throwing weapons, plus health, there is a lot of rewards for looking around. The weapon variety isn’t great though. You quickly find a sword that hits in all 8 spaces around you and thee is little reason not to use it. I theorize there might be more +1s for the default sword, ultimately leading to it doing more damage, but given how fast bosses die, this would be a weak sacrifice. Short ranged ninja stars seem to have more damage than throwing knives, but there range is so short they seem pointless to use over a sword. I enjoy the variety in the game, but the bloat does take a toll in terms of usability

While bosses are underwhelming, basic enemy design is neat? While your movement sucks, they seem to be designed with that in mind, being varied but predictable, allowing you to plan. Some are just dumb simple tanks, some always turn 90 degrees. some grow in ever growing circles, but regardless they’re all easy to understand.

The game is mostly linear but there seems to be things you can do in different orders and other things like optional bosses. It’s extremely fleshed out in a way you wouldn’t assume from the game in the first 10 minutes. It manages to set up simple stories and reoccurring characters that are extremely basic yet perfect for an early Gameboy game.

The game is simple looking but at moments the art drifts into the grotesque. Walls with eyes, giant fleshy demons. All great stuff mixed in with this otherwise cute game.

Sadly the game drags at the end. The difficulty ramps up exponentially. The game has no lives and forgiving continues. You keep all items and other progress when you die, but simply get sent back to the nearest town you saved at. Sadly by the last areas of the game are large and the travel time to retry grows and grows. The game also gets way into illusionary walls near the end, which adds to the crazed level of trial and error. I could forgive a lot about the game but this dragged it down a lot for me. Fortunately some online maps makes things a little bit more reasonable.

Is Ninja Taro worth playing? Probably not. But if you like weird old quirky games not a lot of people have played, it’s kinda cool? Definitely glad I finished it.

2019 was a weird year for me where I felt like I played nothing while I played what seems like far more games than usual. It felt like year spent ‘catching up’, where the scope of what I played didn’t become clear until I started putting it all down on paper. Either way here is my barely proof read yearly ramblings.

Death Stranding

A 2019 game in 2019? I have my friend, April, to thank for this who lent me her PS4 for almost a year at this point to play through several games. She bought Death Stranding not to play herself, but so I could play it in front of her and talk about it. I did that and kept on playing, well after the story had resolved itself.

I have an unabashed love for Hideo Kojima. He is a man who simultaneously gets too much and too little credit for what he does. Kojima is brilliant, but his weird, flawed brilliance is not something exclusive to him. Many in the games industry could be just as amazing and weird if fate had given them a chance. He is as much a product of luck and opportunity as he is a result of his own skill and drive. Indie games have shown us that there potentially many many more “Hideo Kojimas” out there, but we might never see one come to the same level of prominence. The current AAA system is simply just not conducive to it. We are lucky to have even one person like Hideo Kojima.

Some people mistakenly say “Kojima should just make movies”. While I can understand how people come say this, if one really thinks about it, the opposite should become true. Kojima should NEVER make movies. The weakest parts of most Kojima games are the parts that are the most rooted in cinema. He may be able to invoke powers of cinema on a superficial level, but his limitations become obvious whenever does more than that.

Kojima communicates best through game design. The gameplay of his best games not only is fun and rewarding, but feeds perfectly into the mood and the theme of what he’s doing. This is where Death Stranding is at it’s best. Kojima can write a whole cutscene where your magical president moms dies of cancer crying on you in the oval office with minimal emotional impact. But carrying the awkward, ungainly corpse of your mother to an incinerator over lonely terrain? That communicates things cinema can’t — ESPECIALLY not Kojima’s cinemas. The whole theme of interconnectedness and how it works with both the core gameplay and the asynchronous multiplayer just feels perfect. Everything operates on a thematic level and on a gameplay one.

I’m not going to write a whole review on Death Stranding in an end of year summery. I could go on about the weird hype cycle somehow managing to delivery on it’s maddening promises. I could talk about how fucky Mads Mikkelsen is. I could talk about HOW COMPLETELY AND DISTRESSINGLY BACKLOADED THE STORY IS AND OH GOD WHY ARE THESE CUTSCENES TOO LONG but I’m going to talk about mountains.

In most games, it doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment to scale a mountain. At best, it feels hard yet intended and at worst it feels like you’re making a mockery out of the game’s slope systems. Only two games I’ve played really made me feel like I had a relationship with the mountains. One would be Getting Over it with Bennett Foddy and the other would be Death Stranding. Getting Over it was a very intimate relationship with one extremely hard climbing route, but Death Stranding was a game where I could wander into a mountain range, feel like I was totally lost in a hostile environment that didn’t want me there and wasn’t designed for me despite the fact I was supposed to be there and it was designed for me. Death Stranding doesn’t pull any big tricks or mechanics to make this happen. There are many small gameplay systems that contribute to the experience, but I feel the important big choice was simply being okay with making the player miserable.

Death Stranding is a AAA game that was okay with me feeling ways that most AAA games try and polish over. For that, I loved it.

Bloodborne

The original reason I was lent that ps4! A big discussion before Bloodborne came out was always “Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls”? Obviously Dark Souls was the more ambitious and successful of the two, but many of us had a soft spot for the tone of Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls had an oppressive feeling Dark Souls rarely did that was intoxicating. While I always had to prefer Dark Souls over Demon’s Souls due to my love of maps and world design, the miserable world of Boletaria always haunted me.

Then Bloodborne happened. While by the time of it’s release, it was no longer secretly Demon’s Souls 2, it carried that spirit, complete with an incredible level of polish. It exceeds the mood of Demon’s Souls while also representing the peak of Souls combat. Is it’s world design less ambitious than Dark Souls? Yes. Is a lot of Bloodborne kinda samey? Yes. Are the samey parts still EXTREMELY GOOD? Yes!

Bloodborne saw Souls games the way I saw souls games. Bloodthirsty greed and aggressive offense. Sure, in Dark Souls I’d always have a shield equipped — a useful tool for dealing with suddenly extremely dicey situations. But it was almost always the grass crest shield and it was mostly just fueling my offense. So when Bloodborne took away the shield and was like “This game doesn’t need that”, I believed them and was rewarded for it. Maybe following this logic, Sekiro will hit hard with me too. Maybe we’ll see this year…

As for now, Bloodborne is easily the souls game I love to actually play the most.

Dark Souls 3

Dark Souls 3 is a strange game for me. No part of it lights my soul ablaze. None of its world fills me with deep curiosity and wonder. I have no lingering questions. Not because those questions don’t exist, but because the game fails at making me care about their answers. It, more than any other Souls game besides maybe DS2 feels like a game that is just ‘content stitched together’.

But boy is it good content! Dark Souls 3 probably has the best average standard of quality throughout all its areas and bosses out of all the souls game. I feel like it might have this position by quite a large lead. The game is huge and every part of it is good to great (… besides Ashes of Ariandel which sucks outside of one bossfight).

Despite not being entranced by the world, maybe that’s fine? Because there is one feeling Dark Souls 3 does convey. This world is dead. The answer to whatever questions are meaningless because this world is meaningless and may soon be dust. A minor touch that resonated with me was the hollowed enemies. In most souls game they are chaotic and violent and eager to fight. They can think of nothing else. In Dark Souls 3, many have decayed to the point where they must be roused awake by a bell to regain that spark to fight. You fight a Demon Fire Sage who has burnt out, his body reduced to brittle ash. As he fights, he falls apart. Even powerful demons have ran out of time. At the end of the Ringed City you see the fate of the world. Sand. Then you fight some corny ass last boss who looks like he fell into the wrong game, but that vision of the future is still powerful.

Dark Souls 3 never managed the sublime cohesion of the games that come before it in the series, yet still I walk away from it feeling it’s extremely good.

Celeste

Don’t ask me to make more I Wanna be the Guy games. Between something like Celeste and the trolly creations of people in Mario Maker 2, I simply have nothing to offer. I first played Celeste on the Pico-8 and loved it then. A simple, challenging and cute little game. It’s incredible to see how much further it could be fleshed out.

As I write this, I’m not yet ‘done’ with Celeste. I got some B-Sides, C-Sides and the back half of Chapter 9 to go. But I have beat the ‘main’ game and for a lot of people, that alone is enough. It’s hard to even describe what’s nice about Celeste. It manages to make this type of challenging platforming game feel fresh. It manages to characterize its characters so well in so little time. It manages to build its mood and earn emotionally uplifting moments with grace. It doesn’t do a lot while doing a whole lot at the same time.

It’s so hard to write about a great game that succeeds simply by doing everything simply and extremely well. Celeste just oozes craft and I’m glad I managed to fit it into the end of 2019.

Grand Theft Auto Revisited (1 through San Andres)

So one day I’m randoming through my roms and I hit the GBA version of GTA2. It’s kinda nauseating and hard to play. I quit out and think that’ll be the end of it but then I get curious… how were the PC versions of these games?

Well, apparently you can download them for free so I played them! The original GTA 1 and 2 are such weird games. Clearly the developers were hitting on something but they didn’t quite ‘get it’ yet. They’re half way between what GTA 1 will become and some weird (and overly long) score attack game. They don’t really work. They require tons of precision in a game that seems to already require a ton of luck. But what else would you expect from a UK developed game made in this period? They didn’t know fun was legal yet.

Not the best games to play as a gamer, but interesting to check out as designers. You could see the DNA of games to come, including even Hotline Miami (where the phone gimmick is 100% based off of GTA1 and 2).

So now I was curious… how well did GTA3 hold up?

GTA3 was extremely interesting. A fantastically designed map that felt extremely complicated despite it’s super small size. Driving felt nice and good, missions were starting to click but god, sometimes it forgot that it’s okay to have fun. As a general rule in GTA3, any timer or time limit is anywhere for 10-20 seconds stricter than they have any right to be. The game demands a lot from the player in situations with massive civilian car RNG. But when it works, it’s fun! It’s also incredible how sociopathic the game is. I don’t mean in how violent you are — it’s a god damned GTA game — but in how the story is so neutral to all your betrayals. The game doesn’t even wink when a woman who’s brother you killed tortures the wrong man for it. It’s just presented completely dryly and… oddly that feels appropriate?

Also as a minor point, flying the ‘unflyable’ Dodo is shockingly close to flying a plane with poor lift. I found it pretty easy once I learned to get stabilized! Definitely a lot of fun clearing missions in ways you’re not supposed to.

And from there it was Vice City and everything started to click. The map became colorful and memorable. The radio became ridiculously good. Missions… mostly weren’t completely horrible. Hell, sometimes they were really good! Characters were now characters and Tony, while a sociopath, was a very human sociopath. Lance betraying you actually manages to hurt a little! Just a massive step up.

But also the plane sucked and flew all arcadey which made exactly one person sad and that person was me. But at least the Sparrow was awesome.

Now San Andreas I had never played and was really excited to finally play it. It both exceeded my expectations while also in a lot of ways, disappointing me. From a gameplay perspective it was largely all good. Gunfights finally felt right, variety of vehicles was super fun. The map was almost comedically huge while still diverse and interesting. The plot and characters were many MANY times better… but yet I feel like they left a lot on the table. CJ was the most relatable protagonist to date by a LOT. The Grove Street gang members felt so close and personal. The whole start of the game feels like a story out of some indie comic book that’d get adapted to an HBO show. Exaggerated and comedic, but gritty. Actions had weight. For a short bit, killing people actually felt a little heavy!

… But then the game kinda goes off the rails and you’re plowing up bodies in a farm combine, brutally murdering people to steal a rap rhymes book for someone who totally doesn’t deserve it and just… being a GTA protagonist again. The game knew they shouldn’t do Kill Frenzies anymore (which weren’t even that fun in practice anyways) and they knew they were making something more serious, but it feels like sometime early on, the serious people got voted out of power and irreverent “comedy” returned. It felt like they were on the edge of being something special in the plot department, only to end up… decent, despite all odds. It feels funny to be disappointed by the plot of a GTA game but those early grove street missions set a tone the game never found ever again. That said, running over people in a Combine is a pretty good time.

OH ALSO THE PLANES ARE AWESOME like whoever made the plane physics cared about how planes handled and made every plane behave in a way that somewhat mirrored its real world counterparts. As a plane nerd I was very impressed.

Over all take away from the series? Surprisingly still a lot of fun but Rockstar really needed someone to hit them with a ruler every time they set the timer for a mission too low. Oh and also every racing mission ever totally sucks. But hey, still a lot to love.

Devil May Cry (finally)

I had never actually ever played much of any Devil May Cry game. I’ve played and loved games influenced by them but DMC fell within the ps2 generation which is a generation I largely missed. I tried playing DMC3 at some point on PC but the first time through it bounced off me at some point. The timing wasn’t right yet. I even owned 4 through a bundle or something.

I’m not going to go over these like I did for GTA as the evolution was a lot smoother. DMC1 showed its Resident Evil roots even harder than expected, DMC3 was rough in a lot of ways that mostly had to do with the era it came out in, but was gloriously slick where it was important and DMC4 was just a killer fucking game. It’s Devil May Cry, what is there even to say? It’s as good as I hoped!

Maybe for next year I’ll get to talk about DMC5. If not… hey, the fact that everyone hates DMC2 seems like a great reason to play it!

Jurassic Park: Trespasser

I unironically love this game. Like it is totally busted to shit and borderline unplayable but the sheer ambition was ridiculous. It really felt like I was exploring this long forgotten island. The physics are horrible. Interacting with physical keypads and buttons in the world is horrible. Having to rotate your gun manually to see down the sights is horrible. The way background entities get rendered as billboards only to pop back into 30 when you get close is horrible. The dinosaur animation and AI? Horrible horrible horrible and I LOVE it. The sense of place is great. The environmental story telling is surprisingly strong. Sometimes the dumb physics stuff actually works and sometimes a puzzle is actually interesting! And atop all that, when the game fails brutally, it fails hilariously. This is definitely a must play game for people interested in weird quirky games and gaming history.

LIGHTNING ROUND

Minoria

Basically Momodora but 3d! Extremely good! Looks slick as hell. Bombservice basically just makes these sorta ‘capsule metroidvanias’ and I love them. I told Rdein to make the second sword do something cool and then the game was cooler. Now only if he listened to me when I told him to make the nuns kiss. Please enjoy my fanfiction, coming soon to AO3

Dicey Dungeon

By the time I got to play the full version this year it stopped being fun. The game works great as an engine to enjoy broken nonsense the mechanics don’t make the game stand up well to intense difficulty. One of those games where you fail and are just like “what could I have even done differently?”

Still could recommend it, just know the game gets tedious after a certain point.

DS1 Again + Randomizer

Replayed Dark Souls 1! Gosh this game was jankier than I remember. Mostly the hitboxes. The hitboxes are TERRIBLE and nothing has any range. Stuff was sometimes hard for weird reasons I didn’t remember. Would get mad at Ornstein all the time because his collision box was bigger than his hurt box. That said, still the GOAT, still probably “Game of the Decade”, but I do appreciate all the nice changes made to its sequels. Also the “HD Remaster” looks like ass and I only played it because the PTD edition had horrible audio desync bugs for me.

Randomizer was fun though! The completely wacked out enemy placements turns things into a weird puzzle. Even stuff like leveling up becomes a chance for clever and fun “cheese”. Gotta try fog gate randomizer next!

Jalopy

I ALMOST REALLY LOVE THIS GAME. The game about driving forever and fixing your car as it breaks down and smuggling cigarettes past customs and weird Uncles. Very tactile but never quite creates the relationship with your car I hoped for. From all I read the developer was frustrated as well with their inability to really make this great concept totally come together. Still can lead to some great moments though.

Final Fantasy 4

I replayed Final Fantasy 4 for reasons that are completely beyond me. Some thoughts: Oh god I hate random battles. Oh god the japanese version makes so much more sense, not only on a re translation front but also mechanically and oh god what a good soundtrack. Still not a fan of jRPGs anymore but it was… shockingly short?

This kills me. This is right by the Shrine of Winter in Dark Souls 2. This tiny bit of rubble — one that would take two big steps to clear — is responsible for half of your epic journey. You spend hours tracking down powerful souls and risking your life, rather than just finding a stool.

I call this mechanical irony. Mechanical irony is when the limitations in control we have over our character become all too real. “If only I could climb over that” or “if only I could jump off this ladder” or “if only I could step over this gap”. or whatever. When the sensible, real life to a video game problem becomes obvious, it becomes difficult to sustain immersion and the suspension of disbelief. To an extent this is unavoidable. We’re making games and not simulations. We don’t want to give the players the ability to do all these things, we want to convince them to think in the verbs we’ve given them. We want the player to trust us and give we get that, they will give us a lot of leeway.

Bionic Commando for the NES is very good at this. The game requires a large conceit (.. can you even use that word like that?when talking about mechanics?) from the player. You can’t jump. You have to move around with your bionic arm. You’d think the game would be litered with moments of “if only I could jump, I wouldn’t have to go through all this hassle”, but it’s surprisingly not. Every situation where you wish you could jump is quickly solvable with the mechanics the game provide. The game doesn’t want to remind you that you can’t jump, it wants you to focus on swinging around. To a degree, new players still get frustrated with the inability to jump, but when you consider what a huge concession that is, the game does an amazing job of making the player think about it’s core mechanics.

The Shrine of Winter in Dark Souls 2 does not do that. It’s downright taunting. It could possibly be ignored as a dead end, except for the item on the other end. While many areas of souls games could be destroyed with climbing skills, you generally don’t think about it (though probably also in Belfry Sol!). Here, it’s preposterous. Here it looks like, without invisible walls, you could possibly even jump over it with the mechanics given to you in the game. It could even get you to think about other things. Like, what is that shrine even for if it would be so easy to walk around in real life? Little stuff exists like this every where (welp, fell down, time to walk all the way back to the stair case instead of pulling my self up from the edge) but usually those are so minor, people don’t notice. Here? It’s HALF THE GAME and totally avoidable. No one looks at the Lordvessel door and goes Well you know, if I had some TNT or a hammer…”. People just go with it. If the Shrine of Winter blocked a bridge, most people wouldn’t think about “simply getting rope”. That’s because they’re not having their face rubbed in it. They’re not being taunted. The players want to be immersed. Not everyone is going to fall down little thought-holes like this, but they’re best to avoid when possible, especially when trying to construct games with structurally sound worlds.

Now, taunting isn’t always bad. Dark Souls taunts all the time (though usually not in ways that damage the integrity of the world). A good example of this is Vini Vidi Vici in VVVVVV, where the character, who can’t “jump” is forced to reverse gravity and fall through several screens of spikes to get around an ankle high block. VVVVVV has little “immersion” to speak of and it serves as an excellent gag for an excellent challenge. You could even argue for this in more serious games. Again, the Belfry Sol is an annoying taunt, but it’s repercussions are mild. Is it a good gag? I personally wouldn’t do it, but I could fancy an argument for it. In most cases though, if you’re making a game with any kind of “world” you want to avoid bringing attention to aspects like this.